Friday, August 7, 2015

The Self-Styled Self-Publishing Experts Who Know Nothing

Michael Kozlowski is a liar and a plagiarist. He claims to be a journalist, but to me a journalist is a professional who gathers facts and then assembles a readable article. From what I've seen of Michael Kozlowski's work, he seems to think it's journalism when you take another reporter's work and repost it. That's not journalism. That's theft. And what makes it worse is that Michael Kozlowski doesn't even check the material he steals, which means he publishes lies and rumour.You can read his Good eReader blog HERE - but I wouldn't bother. It's rubbish. And pretty much all the material is lifted from elsewhere.This is how Michael Kozlowski of Good eReader describes himself on his Twitter account -

He says he's editor-in-chief but I get the impression he's a one-man band at Good Ereader. He describes himself as a 'young hero' but he's not that young and he's no hero.I'm not the only one who thinks that Michael Kozlowski shouldn't be describing himself as an editor in chief. And he often gets accused of blogging nonsense to get traffic to his blog. He's a blogger, and not a very good one, and not a journalist.

Eric is right to question Michael Kozlowski's journalist credentials. A look at Michael Kozlowski's CV shows that he has had no journalist training. He is not a journalist.

Professional journalists, when confronted with their mistakes, apologise and print a correction. Not Michael Kozlowski. I know this from experience because he published lies about me. He didn't apologise when I pointed out his errors, he just rewrote the article so that it contained even more lies. And he justified his lies by showing me the articles he'd stolen his copy from. I pointed out that those articles were inaccurate, but he didn't care.This is one of the passages he wrote which is an absolute lie -

I have never, ever, paid for reviews. I've never had to, I always get plenty of reviews. That is an absolute lie. Nor have I ever posted false reviews. I review under my own names and I do not review my own books. Why Michael Kozlowski published those lies on Good eReader, I have no idea. But it calls into question anything else the man writes. He can not be trusted.

Michael Kozlowski makes a lot of claims about being a publishing expert. He isn't. It's clear from what he writes about self-publishing that he has no real understanding of the process.I'll go into more detail when I've got the time. At the moment all I want to say is that Michael Kozlowski is a liar and a plagiarist. As a result, you can't believe anything he writes. Not a word. There are also doubts about his impartiality. He accused me of paying for reviews - which is an absolute lie. But he quite happily tells manufacturers that they can buy reviews in his column. That's worth repeating. If you pay money to Michael Kozlowski, he will review your products. The man is a liar and a plagiarist and a hypocrite.

Michael Kozlowski is one of a growing number of so-called 'publishing experts' you find on the internet these days. The common thread seems to be that they have no professional journalism experience and steal copy from each other with abandon.It turns out that one of the 'journalists' that Kozlowski stole from was self-styled publishing guru Suw Charman-Anderson, who I have discussed before.If he had made any attempt to check the 'facts' he lifted from Suw Charman-Anderson he would have realised that they were inaccurate. But he didn't. He just stole from her without checking. Suw Charman-Anderson is unreliable and the last person anyone should be copying. She claims to be a social technologist, journalist and writer, yet she refuses to deal with Amazon.

In fact Suw Charman-Anderson recently announced she was giving up self-publishing. You can read about that HERE

It's hardly surprising that her foray into self-publishing was so unsuccessful - ignoring Amazon makes no sense at all. And anyone who suggests that is really not giving sensible advice to aspiring writers. (I also think that a real journalist wouldn't feel the need to use the word "shit" in an article about self-publishing, but that's another story.)

Here's an example of Suw Charman-Anderson's writing - which pretty much says all there is to say about her, frankly.

She also touts herself as a social media "expert" but seems to think it acceptable to use profanity on Twitter, and her blog. That fact alone means any advice she offers about social media is suspect. Michael Kozlowski stole from an article in which Suw Charman-Anderson discussed my marketing techniques. She was wrong in what she wrote, but Kozlowski used her information as fact, without attribution and without checking. He repeated lies that she told.

If you want to get an idea of how much of an expert Suw Charman-Anderson is on social media all you have to do is to look at her Twitter stats. Last time I looked she had sent almost 80,000 tweets (the equivalent of two million words, by the way - more than 20 novels!) but despite that prodigious output she had fewer than 6,000 followers. So she tweets away but hardly anyone notices. Does having 6,000 followers quality her as any sort of expert on social media?

Not according to TwitterCounter who say that there are more than 100,000 Twitter accounts that are more popular than Suw Charman-Anderson. So presumably there are 100,000 people who know more about social media than she does. Michael Kozlowski is even less popular than Sue Charman-Amderson, with just a few hundred followers. So the question is, who can you depend on to offer up useful, and accurate, advice to writers who are just starting out? Not writers like Suw Charman-Anderson or Michael Kozlowski, that's for sure. Michael Kozlowski, for instance, doesn't think that self-published writers should call themselves authors. You can read that claptrap HERE on his Good Ereader blog. The man's an idiot. As well as a liar and a plagiarist.He also thinks that self-published authors are destroying literature. You can read that nonsense HERE but I'd suggest that you don't bother.

It seems to me that the best guide to the quality of the advice you will get comes from the number of books the person has sold. Not the number of books they have written because there are plenty of awful authors who are churning out rubbish books in huge numbers. Look to see how many books they have sold. Suw Charman-Anderson - virtually none. So look instead for advice from writers like Stephen King, Lee Child, Val McDermid and Jefferey Deaver, who sell in their millions.

And if you want advice from a self-publishing guru - a real self-publishing guru and not simply a wannabe - then go to the font of all knowledge, the awesome JA Konrath who has sold well over a million eBooks himself. YOU CAN READ JA KONRATH'S ADVICE BY CLICKING HERE

1 comment:

Interesting, a lot going on here that many of us do not see. I think there are a few authors that have "cracked" e-publishing, including yourself, are there is a lot of jealousy out there too. If someone does well, then obviously they are fixing the system in some way! - That's lazy and ignorant thinking. And the links you have shared are all about lazy and ignorant thinking.....

The Time In London

Stephen Leather has written more than 30 novels and is one of Amazon's most successful self-publishers. His eBook The Basement topped the Amazon eBook charts in the US and the UK. You can see more of Stephen Leather's work at www.stephenleather.com